What's Wrong with the World
wildest adventure will end in a restaurant, while the yokel’s tamest
adventure may end in a police-court. If he smashes a window he can
pay for it; if he smashes a man he can pension him. He can (like the
millionaire in the story) buy an hotel to get a glass of gin. And
because he, the luxurious man, dictates the tone of nearly all
“advanced” and “progressive” thought, we have almost forgotten what a
home really means to the overwhelming millions of mankind.
For the truth is, that to the moderately poor the home is the only place
of liberty. Nay, it is the only place of anarchy. It is the only spot
on the earth where a man can alter arrangements suddenly, make an
experiment or indulge in a whim. Everywhere else he goes he must accept
the strict rules of the shop, inn, club, or museum that he happens to
enter. He can eat his meals on the floor in his own house if he likes.
I often do it myself; it gives a curious, childish, poetic, picnic
feeling. There would be considerable trouble if I tried to do it in
an A.B.C. tea-shop. A man can wear a dressing gown and slippers in his
house; while I am sure that this would not be permitted at the Savoy,
though I never actually tested the point. If you go to a restaurant
you must drink some of the wines on the wine list, all of them if you
insist, but certainly some of them. But if you have a house and garden
you can try to make hollyhock tea or convolvulus wine if you like. For a
plain, hard-working man the home is not the one tame place in the world
of adventure. It is the one wild place in the world of rules and set
tasks. The home is the one place where he can put the carpet on the
ceiling or the slates on the floor if he wants to. When a man spends
every night staggering from bar to bar or from music-hall to music-hall,
we say that he is living an irregular life. But he is not; he is living
a highly regular life, under the dull, and often oppressive, laws of
such places. Some times he is not allowed even to sit down in the bars;
and frequently he is not allowed to sing in the music-halls. Hotels may
be defined as places where you are forced to dress; and theaters may
be defined as places where you are forbidden to smoke. A man can only
picnic at home.
Now I take, as I have said, this small human omnipotence, this
possession of a definite cell or chamber of liberty, as the working
model for the present inquiry. Whether we can give every English man
a free home of his own or not, at least we should desire it; and he
desires it. For the moment we speak of what he wants, not of what he
expects to get. He wants, for instance, a separate house; he does not
want a semi-detached house. He may be forced in the commercial race
to share one wall with another man. Similarly he might be forced in a
three-legged race to share one leg with another man; but it is not so
that he pictures himself in his dreams of elegance and liberty. Again,
he does not desire a flat. He can eat and sleep and praise God in a
flat; he can eat and sleep and praise God in a railway train. But a
railway train is not a house, because it is a house on wheels. And a
flat is not a house, because it is a house on stilts. An idea of
earthy contact and foundation, as well as an idea of separation and
independence, is a part of this instructive human picture.
I take, then, this one institution as a test. As every normal man
desires a woman, and children born of a woman, every normal man desires
a house of his own to put them into. He does not merely want a roof
above him and a chair below him; he wants an objective and visible
kingdom; a fire at which he can cook what food he likes, a door he can
open to what friends he chooses. This is the normal appetite of men; I
do not say there are not exceptions. There may be saints above the need
and philanthropists below it. Opalstein, now he is a duke, may have got
used to more than this; and when he was a convict may have got used
to less. But the normality of the thing is enormous. To give nearly
everybody ordinary houses would please nearly everybody; that is what I
assert without apology. Now in modern England (as you eagerly point out)
it is very difficult to give nearly everybody houses. Quite so; I merely
set up the desideratum; and ask the reader to leave it standing there
while he turns with me to a consideration of what really happens in the
social wars of our time.
*****
IX. HISTORY OF HUDGE AND GUDGE
There is, let us say, a certain filthy rookery in Hoxton, dripping with
disease and honeycombed with crime and promiscuity. There are, let us
say, two noble and courageous young men, of pure intentions and (if you
prefer it) noble birth; let us call them Hudge and Gudge. Hudge, let us
say, is of a bustling sort; he points out that the people must at all
costs be got out of this den; he subscribes and collects money, but he
finds (despite the large financial interests of the Hudges) that the
thing will have to be done on the cheap if it is to be done on the spot.
He therefore, runs up a row of tall bare tenements like beehives; and
soon has all the poor people bundled into their little brick cells,
which are certainly better than their old quarters, in so far as they
are weather proof, well ventilated and supplied with clean water. But
Gudge has a more delicate nature. He feels a nameless something lacking
in the little brick boxes; he raises numberless objections; he even
assails the celebrated Hudge Report, with the Gudge Minority Report; and
by the end of a year or so has come to telling Hudge heatedly that the
people were much happier where they were before. As the people preserve
in both places precisely the same air of dazed amiability, it is very
difficult to find out which is right. But at least one might safely say
that no people ever liked stench or starvation as such, but only some
peculiar pleasures en tangled with them. Not so feels the sensitive
Gudge. Long before the final quarrel (Hudge v. Gudge and Another), Gudge
has succeeded in persuading himself that slums and stinks are really
very nice things; that the habit of sleeping fourteen in a room is
what has made our England great; and that the smell of open drains is
absolutely essential to the rearing of a viking breed.
But, meanwhile, has there been no degeneration in Hudge? Alas, I fear
there has. Those maniacally ugly buildings which he originally put up
as unpretentious sheds barely to shelter human life, grow every day more
and more lovely to his deluded eye. Things he would never have dreamed
of defending, except as crude necessities, things like common kitchens
or infamous asbestos stoves, begin to shine quite sacredly before him,
merely because they reflect the wrath of Gudge. He maintains, with the
aid of eager little books by Socialists, that man is really happier in
a hive than in a house. The practical difficulty of keeping total
strangers out of your bedroom he describes as Brotherhood; and the
necessity for climbing twenty-three flights of cold stone stairs, I dare
say he calls Effort. The net result of their philanthropic adventure is
this: that one has come to defending indefensible slums and still more
indefensible slum-landlords, while the other has come to treating as
divine the sheds and pipes which he only meant as desperate. Gudge
is now a corrupt and apoplectic old Tory in the Carlton Club; if
you mention poverty to him he roars at you in a thick, hoarse voice
something that is conjectured to be “Do ‘em good!” Nor is Hudge more
happy; for he is a lean vegetarian with a gray, pointed beard and an
unnaturally easy smile, who goes about telling everybody that at last we
shall all sleep in one universal bedroom; and he lives in a Garden City,
like one forgotten of God.
Such is the lamentable history of Hudge and Gudge; which I merely
introduce as a type of an endless and exasperating misunderstanding
which is always occurring in modern England. To get men out of a rookery
men are put into a tenement; and at the beginning the healthy human
soul loathes them both. A man’s first desire is to get away as far as
possible from the rookery, even should his mad course lead him to a
model dwelling. The second desire is, naturally, to get away from the
model dwelling, even if it should lead a man back to the rookery. But
I am neither a Hudgian nor a Gudgian; and I think the mistakes of these
two famous and fascinating persons arose from one simple fact. They
arose from the fact that neither Hudge nor Gudge had ever thought for
an instant what sort of house a man might probably like for himself.
In short, they did not begin with the ideal; and, therefore, were not
practical politicians.
We may now return to the purpose of our awkward parenthesis about the
praise of the future and the failures of the past. A house of his own
being the obvious ideal for every man, we may now ask (taking this need
as typical of all such needs) why he hasn’t got it; and whether it is
in any philosophical sense his own fault. Now, I think that in
some philosophical sense it is his own fault, I think in a yet more
philosophical sense it is the fault of his philosophy. And this is what
I have now to attempt to explain.
Burke, a fine rhetorician, who rarely faced realities, said, I think,
that an Englishman’s house is his castle. This is honestly entertaining;
for as it happens the Englishman is almost the only man in Europe whose
house is not his castle. Nearly everywhere else exists the assumption of
peasant proprietorship; that a poor man may be a landlord, though he is
only lord of his own land. Making the landlord and the tenant the same
person has certain trivial advantages, as that the tenant pays no rent,
while the landlord does a little work. But I am not concerned with the
defense of small proprietorship, but merely with the fact that it exists
almost everywhere except in England. It is also true, however, that this
estate of small possession is attacked everywhere today; it has never
existed among ourselves, and it may be destroyed among our neighbors. We
have, therefore, to ask ourselves what it is in human affairs generally,
and in this domestic ideal in particular, that has really ruined the
natural human creation, especially in this country.
Man has always lost his way. He has been a tramp ever since Eden; but he
always knew, or thought he knew, what he was looking for. Every man has
a house somewhere in the elaborate cosmos; his house waits for him waist
deep in slow Norfolk rivers or sunning itself upon Sussex downs. Man has
always been looking for that home which is the subject matter of this
book. But in the bleak and blinding hail of skepticism to which he
has been now so long subjected, he has begun for the first time to be
chilled, not merely in his hopes, but in his desires. For the first time
in history he begins really to doubt the object of his wanderings on the
earth. He has always lost his way; but now he has lost his address.
Under the pressure of certain upper-class philosophies (or in other
words, under the pressure of Hudge and Gudge) the average man has
really become bewildered about the goal of his efforts; and his efforts,
therefore, grow feebler and feebler. His simple notion of having a home
of his own is derided as bourgeois, as sentimental, or as despicably
Christian. Under various verbal forms he is recommended to go on to the
streets--which is called Individualism; or to the work-house--which
is called Collectivism. We shall consider this process somewhat more
carefully in a moment. But it may be said here that Hudge and Gudge, or
the governing class generally, will never fail for lack of some modern
phrase to cover their ancient predominance. The great lords will refuse